Automated mechanical transmissions are well known in the art and fault tolerant methods of gear selection for such transmissions have been proposed. See for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,109,721, 4,922,425 and 4,849,899 all assigned to the assignee of the present invention, the disclosures of which are all hereby incorporated by reference. While such methods have been successful, the approach to fault tolerance has been to either maintain the transmission in the existing gear, limit gear selection to the auxiliary range section of transmission gears or modify the control algorithm to accommodate loss of a sensor.